Overview

Improving functionalities for Allsteel

Allsteel, a furniture company that sells office, healthcare, and classroom products, tasked us to upgrade some of their most trafficked experiences on their website, which included navigation, search, and product detail pages.

Challenge

Building experiences for multiple audiences

Within the Allsteel base, the majority of users are B2B dealers choosing items out for their showcases. There are also users browsing and looking for general inspiration for a space. You can't buy and ship products on the website, this process must be done through finding a local dealer or showroom. The biggest challenge within this project was finding the balance of functionality and inspiration while thinking through different audience needs.

Discovery

Understanding the current landscape

Over the span of a few days we dug deep into the current landscape and performed a content audit, user journeys, competitive analysis, and more.

Research

Performing stakeholder interviews

After discovery, we asked the client if they'd be willing to extend their budget for research such as interviews. After the go ahead, I had the chance to talk to stakeholders from different positions and companies who were using the website on a day to day basis. I wrote the interview scripts and moderated for 8 different sessions. These stakeholders shared some very common themes related to difficulty navigating, outdated specs, and hidden functionalities.

Wireframes

Turning insights into design

Once we gathered those common pain points and found opportunities to update these experiences, I started building out sketches and wire frames for search, PDP, and navigation.

Takeaways

Listening to your audiences

There were many insights throughout this project, but above all of that was the importance of listening and taking insights from the site's daily users. On future projects, I will remind myself the necessity of interviews to validate our thinking. It was a reminder that we're not designing for ourselves and each audience has a different set of needs and aspirations that can only be discovered through this process. After user insights, the work felt purposeful and supportive to our audiences.